Transfer Station

After the death of his wife, Loring began giving away things for free. His sister-in-law worried it was some kind of “suicide thing,” as his brother Bill put it, which only showed how little they knew him. Loring wasn’t suicidal. If anything, in the four months since Gloria died, there was a new kind of calmness about him, a welcome flatness, an absence of things.

For as long as Gloria had been sick they hadn’t talked much about what Loring would do after, which struck him as kind of funny now; they’d had the time. But they’d never been planners. They weren’t organizers either, which left Loring with a cramped, tired Northeast Philadelphia row house jammed with stuff—old cameras and workbenches, sewing machines and candles, canning jars, camping lanterns, dozens of colored glass bottles and stoneware bowls, hundreds of books and records. At first, he didn’t notice. Gloria died in June. Loring could barely account for the weeks since, most of them spent in the dark cave of the living room. Then one day he tripped and fell down the basement stairs, splitting his head open and spilling his beer down his shirt. As he pulled himself onto his elbows, touched the blood above his eye, he felt a spasm of fury—clean and bright and fleeting, but enough for him to see how his life looked. Some of the stuff was sentimental, but most of it junk. Giving it away was not symbolic of anything. He had too much in his house.

*

He wrote the sign on a piece of corrugated cardboard from the bottom of a case of Pabst: FREE STUFF. Then he found a pair of rusty shears in the garage and cut back the blunt, mossy hedges by the front door, the dull blade chewing slowly through the thick stems. When he was finished, the bushes looked sloppy, but he’d managed to clear away the porch, a gray concrete square. The living-room windows let more light in, he noticed. Gloria would have liked this; he wished he’d done it before.

He and Gloria had lived here thirty-three years, and she’d been sick for most of the last ten. They had neglected things. The lawn was overgrown and weedy. A long crack wandered crookedly down a kitchen window, patched with duct tape—Loring couldn’t remember how it got there. A corner of the bedroom ceiling dripped when it rained. Bill, his brother, wanted Loring to move. This section of Philly wasn’t “good” anymore, Bill said. He didn’t know the half of it—the car windows smashed for loose change in the cup holders, the ten-year-old shot just blocks away. When Loring and Gloria first moved here, there was still a sense of community, people sitting on stoops and kids playing ball in the street. But over the years the neighborhood grew sunken, wary. People moved away. Still, Loring felt immune to serious danger; this was his house. His home. The week after Gloria died, Bill and his wife, Sharon, made a rare visit, Sharon grimacing as she stepped over the threshold, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves and briskly taking charge—bagging up Gloria’s pills and supplements, scrubbing dishes, sifting through the flowers the school had sent and picking out the dead ones. When she found Gloria’s weed, Sharon gave a pointed sigh but tucked it back in the utensil drawer.

While Sharon was jabbing a vacuum into the dark corners of the living room, Bill took Loring outside and suggested he think about moving. “The memories,” Bill said, awkward, hands in pockets, change jingling, peering down the street toward the store that sold lottery tickets and cigarettes. “Plus, you know…,” he added, and waved one hand, as if to indicate all of it—the sagging row houses, the graffiti-smattered bus shelter, the eviction notice pinned to a neighbor’s door. A car drove by, radio blasting. Loring smiled. He enjoyed seeing his brother squirm. “I mean, you could afford to, right?” Bill said, but the money wasn’t the point. When had Loring ever cared about something so material? His brother knew at least this much about him, unless his rich wife had brainwashed him completely. Bill looked at him and said, “Don’t stay just to make a point.”

Loring gazed over his brother’s shoulder. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said, but stopped himself there. Bill had accused him of acting superior before. What Loring might have added was that he’d rather die tomorrow than live in a neighborhood like Bill and Sharon’s, one of those cookie-cutter developments where people looked at you sideways if your backyard wasn’t pruned. Here no one judged. No one cared. Gloria had strung their backyard with white lights, crammed it with wicker chairs, shaggy plants, and cedar mulch, a tangle of clotheslines.

“Fine,” Bill said. “Stay. But at least don’t be idle. Do something. Get out of the house.” He glanced at the recycling barrels, three of them brimming with cans, and some bags besides. “You could teach again. They’d bring you back, in some capacity, right?”

Two years before, Loring took early retirement; the school district offered him a generous package and it allowed him to take care of Gloria full-time. There had been a goodbye dinner, speeches, presents. Loring had taught high-school history for thirty-two years. The low track, the “bad” kids, though he never once referred to them that way. He prided himself on his ability to connect with his students, to find the good in kids whose lives were far worse than his own. At Christmas, he always received gifts—a watch, a book of stamps, a bottle of cologne. Loring thanked them, meaning it, hoping the stuff wasn’t stolen. He kept it all. He still remembered his favorite present—1989, little fat-faced Maurice Morris, who made a replica of Vet Stadium out of half a milk jug, each tiny paper seat stuck on with a wad of chewing gum. The kid was a genius.

It was all here, Loring thought, somewhere. On a Sunday in September, after assuring his brother he wasn’t suicidal, Loring hung up the phone and scanned the packed basement. He felt a single beat of excitement, the first he’d felt in a long while, contemplating what to give away first.

*

The first day it was a coffee table, only slightly scuffed. Cheap cherry wood, a single cloudy water ring on top. Loring had decided he wouldn’t put out anything in truly bad condition. Standards were low around here, but still, it wasn’t right. In smaller letters across the bottom of the cardboard sign, he added: GENTLY USED. Then he propped his sign against the leg of the coffee table, opened up a frayed lawn chair and carried it to his porch. He would give away just one thing each day. He liked the prospect of stretching out the process—maybe into October. Maybe it was his old teacher’s instinct kicking in, equating the fall with a new project. Each afternoon, he could sit and wait for takers, see whose hands his stuff ended up in, like watching birds alight on the feeders Gloria had hung all over the backyard.

He sat down, cracked open a beer, and watched the people. He saw only a few faces he recognized. Most shot a wary glance at the table, as if suspicious of anything free. It was over an hour before someone stopped, a heavyset woman with a wide, shiny face. She smoothed a palm over the surface of the table, glanced at Loring. “My son just went away to college.”

“Good for him,” Loring said. In this neighborhood, it was not a small thing.

“Might be nice for him. For his room. You know?”

Loring agreed.

“I’ll send my husband back,” the woman said. As he waited, Loring envisioned the coffee table’s new life in a dorm room, propping up a boy’s shoes, piled with textbooks and beer cans. Fifteen minutes later, a rotting Chevy pulled up. The husband strode to the table and, without a glance at Loring, tossed it in the back and drove off.

*

The next day, a pair of speakers. These went quick. “They work?” said the guy who paused. He was twenty-five maybe, in a jumpsuit and black Phillies cap.

“Guaranteed,” said Loring. “Two hundred watts.”

“Free, huh?”

“That’s right.”

The man inspected them, looking for the catch, and it occurred to Loring that wariness had become the norm—nobody trusted anything anymore. Loring sipped his beer, feeling magnanimous, wanting the guy to take the speakers. Finally he said, “All right, man,” and tucked the speakers like two footballs under his arms.

“Enjoy,” said Loring.

*

It was the third afternoon, Wednesday, that the kids came. Two boys and a girl—sophomores, Loring guessed—all of them carrying backpacks, walking home from school. They were making their way slowly down the other side of the street when one shouted, “Yo! Free!” and they all ran over and crowded onto Loring’s uncut lawn.

“Check it out,” one of the boys said, the bigger of the two. He was wearing enormous, drooping mesh shorts and a green Eagles jersey that strained across his soft gut. His cheeks were flushed red, topped with a white-blond crew cut and a cap turned backwards, the stained bill turned up. The boy picked up the ottoman in two hands and pumped it over his head, as if it weighed nothing. It was dark green velvet, one small tear.

“What is it?” asked the girl. She was leaning over the boy’s shoulder, sipping at a can of Sunkist. Tall and angular, her eyelids coated with makeup and her thin brown hair streaked with blond.

“What do you think?” said the boy. “A footrest. You know, for resting my tired fucking feet on.” He dropped the ottoman and flopped backwards on the lawn, propping his huge puffy red sneakers on it, his chubby calves. Loring smiled. There was something he loved about these kids—their easy bravado, their playful lack of caution. This one, he thought, was the clown.

“Yo, look,” said the girl. She was pointing at Loring.

“Good afternoon,” Loring said, which made them all laugh.

“What’s up with him?” said the boy, as if Loring wasn’t standing there.

“He’s a hippie,” the girl said knowingly, which caused Loring to reflect for a moment on what he looked like. His ragged gray beard, his bald freckled head. He wore old paint-stained shorts and his feet were bare. It had been a long time since he’d thought about his physical appearance; as Gloria grew sicker, she didn’t like mirrors.

“What’s a hippie?” said the boy on the ground, hands locked behind his head.

“Were you at Woodstock?” the girl said, squinting at Loring over her soda can.

“What’s Woodstock?” said the boy.

“Shut up, Eddie.”

“What?”

“Tell him,” Loring said, nodding at the girl. “Go ahead. Tell him what a hippie is.”

She regarded him suspiciously, as if this might be some kind of trick, carefully pushing a lock of hair out of one eye. “It’s like a freaky person,” she said. Both boys laughed. “A freaky person who smokes drugs.” The chubby boy—Eddie—looked at Loring with new interest, raising his eyebrows and lifting his head. “You smoke drugs?”

“Not anymore,” Loring shrugged. “Sorry.” He thought of the bag of weed his sister-in-law had unearthed in June. Gloria had smoked it at the end, to escape the excruciating pain; at some point this summer, Loring must have finished it.

Bored, Eddie and the girl turned back to the ottoman. The other boy, the quiet one, hung back. He was small, swimming in a giant striped polo shirt and baggy jeans. A fake diamond stud anchored each ear, but with his smattering of freckles and long lashes, his face was almost pretty. The boy was looking closely at Loring, probably weighing this information—Woodstock and hippies, how Loring had gotten from there to here. A thoughtful kid, shy, hanging on the sidelines. A kid who could be reached.

“This a footrest, right?” Eddie was saying. He was standing on the ottoman now, bouncing slightly, hands cupped around his mouth, and bellowed, “Hey, hippie, this a footrest?”

“It’s an ottoman,” said Loring.

“What?”

“Ottoman. That’s what it’s called.”

Loring sipped his beer. He had gotten through to kids like these before. Just a few years ago a former student, Charles Rush—now in his thirties, a husband and father, a bus driver—looked him up in the White Pages and called him on the phone. He was calling to thank him. They talked for a half-hour, and Loring and Gloria ended up going over to their house in Fishtown. When Charles answered the door, he broke into a grin. Damn, Mr. Walsh, you got old!

“Free, huh?” the quiet boy said.

Loring nodded at him. “That’s right.”

“We can just, like, walk off with it?” Eddie demanded, almost as if he wanted some resistance to make it worthwhile.

“It’s yours,” Loring said, and added, “I’ll have something else tomorrow.”

“Yeah?” They glanced at each other. “See you tomorrow then.”

*

The next day, as Loring surveyed his basement, he had the three kids in mind. Finally he settled on his old turntable, even picked out a few albums in their soft, furred jackets. He waited until mid-afternoon, about the time school would get out. And there they came.

“Hey, hippie!” they called, crowding his lawn.

“Welcome back,” said Loring.

“What’s this?”

“That’s a record player.” He smiled. “We hippies used to listen to records.”

The other boy, the quiet one, lifted the lid.

“What are we supposed to do with it?” said Eddie, shoving the sleeves of his jersey up to his elbows. Loring saw the cheap tattoos blurring the insides of both arms. “We don’t got any records.”

Don’t have, Loring thought, a reflex he fortunately checked.

“There are some—right there.” Loring nodded at the pile and Eddie scooped it up. “Bob Dylan,” he said. “The Band.” He screwed up his face. “What kind of name is The Band?”

“Dumb,” the girl breathed. She was wearing a necklace that said TRISHA in glittery gold script.

“Cream,” Eddie read, and burst out laughing. “Cream?”

“That’s Eric Clapton,” Loring told him. “The best guitarist there ever was.”

“Hey, I know him,” the girl said, grabbing at the album.

“Like hell you do, Trish,” Eddie said. He flipped quickly through the rest, uninterested, but the other boy, Loring noticed, was inspecting the turntable, lifting up the needle and placing it gently back in its groove. “Man, we don’t listen to no hippie music,” Eddie whined.

“It’s classic rock,” said Loring, sipping his beer. “Vintage.”

“What’s vintage?” Eddie said.

“Old,” said the girl—Trisha—looking pointedly at Loring. She was smart, perceptive, he thought, probably funny; but she had a bite. “It means old, right?”

Loring shrugged. He understood this balance of power, how fragile it was. Best to pretend indifference. “You don’t have to take it,” he said. “Just leave it.”

The kids exchanged a look. “How much is it worth?” the quiet one said.

Loring looked at him. It hadn’t occurred to him that these kids might be taking the stuff to sell it—a pawn shop or eBay or something. Did it matter? But it did; for some reason, Loring wanted them to keep it. Either way, he wasn’t about to tell them the value of that turntable. A Pioneer—his parents had splurged on it for his eighteenth birthday.

“Why don’t you tell me your names,” he said instead. He scratched his beard. “You’re Eddie. And you’re Trisha.”

“The hippie pays attention,” she said, but her voice was wary.

“What about you?” he said, addressing the smaller boy.

“You first.”

“My name’s Loring.”

At this, they all cracked up, as he’d known they would. He drained his beer and let them get it out. “Loring?” they cried. He imagined what would happen if he told them he was a teacher—a bad idea either way it went. If they had bad associations with teachers, they would hate him by proxy; if they respected teachers, they would think he was pathetic. “Loring? What kind of name is that?”

“It was my father’s name,” he said, then addressed the quiet boy. “And yours?”

“Calvin,” he said, proudly. “You know, a normal name.” He picked up the turntable and Eddie grabbed the albums and they took off down the sidewalk, the long cord trailing behind them. “See you tomorrow, Lorrrrring.”

*

The mirror required some searching, but Loring was certain Trisha would like it. Red mosaic tile, shaped like a sunburst; Gloria had found it at a flea market out in Bucks County, and it hung above their mantel when they first moved in. Eventually he found it, wedged under a wine rack and covered in dust a quarter-inch thick. Loring rubbed it with some of the Windex that Sharon had tucked under his kitchen sink. When he picked up the mirror, he caught his reflection in the glass—the craggy red contours of his nose, his wiry beard, completely gray. There was a healing cut above his eye, from his fall, the skin around it still green.

It was a cloudy day, and the air smelled like rain. Loring dug around in the shed and found an old blue camping tarp that he slung across the branches of his Japanese maple. He put the mirror and his sign under the tarp. Under FREE, he wrote DRY. Then he sat down on the porch, under the corrugated lip of roof. It started raining. A young woman pushing a stroller paused, and Loring willed her to keep going. She tried once to lift the mirror, then glanced at the weather and put it back down.

Hard drops began pelting the tarp. Raining, and a Friday—Loring hoped the kids would show. Then he heard a fast smattering of footsteps and breathy laughter and they crowded under the tarp, Trisha shouting, “Ooh, that’s mine!”

Calvin lifted his chin in Loring’s direction. Loring nodded back.

“What you mean, yours?” Eddie said, hiking up his giant shorts. His round face hung, dripping, over the glass.

“It’s a girl mirror, dumbass,” Trisha said, laughing. “You a girl or something?” They jounced and joked, and Loring felt an opening in his chest. Happiness.

Trisha picked it up. “Damn, it’s heavy!”

“It’s an antique,” Loring explained.

“See, Trish,” said Eddie. “An antique. Because you’re so fancy.”

“Like you would know, fat boy,” Trisha said, but the humor was gone. Her voice was sharp, probably wounded. Loring had seen it a million times—how quickly vulnerability could turn into meanness. She shoved the mirror into Eddie’s gut. “Carry that,” she told him. Her eyes flicked toward Loring, and though she didn’t say anything, he imagined her look said thank you.

“See you Monday,” Loring told them as they walked off, like a teacher on a Friday afternoon.

*

Loring put away his sign for the weekend. He would set up shop again on Monday, a school day, when he knew the kids would be coming. To have something to look forward to—he had forgotten the feeling. On Saturday he wandered into the backyard and noticed things he’d been neglecting. The unfilled bird feeders, the plants gone brown at the tips. What had he been doing for the past four months? Looking back, one empty day blurred indistinguishably into the next. He bent to finger the dead leaves, wishing suddenly they’d had children. He and Gloria had talked about it years ago, but like many things, it never felt urgent. They were happy; they had each other. Besides, Loring’s days had been populated by kids, hundreds and thousands of kids—to think there was once a time when life felt almost too full to contain. Loring sank onto his knees. He could not have anticipated this loneliness; to anticipate it would have meant admitting it would one day come. As he stared at the ruined garden, a warm spring night returned to him—he and Gloria sitting in this very spot, under the knotty clotheslines and the pale sky, paper lanterns and Carole King and a bottle of Clos du Bois, a stubborn universe of their own making. His arms felt heavy. He was aware of his solitude; he could feel it. He stood up and went back inside, opened a beer. When the phone rang, he saw it was his brother, and ignored it.

*

“It’s a telescope,” said Loring.

Calvin had picked it up immediately, and Loring tried to conceal his pride; he’d known Calvin would like it. He’d chosen it with him in mind.

“You can look at things in the distance and they look closer,” Loring told him.

“I know what a telescope is,” Calvin breathed, and Trisha’s head snapped around. “You think he’s stupid or something?”

“No,” Loring said. “I don’t. Not at all.” He was standing on his porch, surveying the scene, rocking slowly from toes to heels. “In fact, I think he’s a very smart young man.”

“Ooh, hear that?” Trisha said. “The hippie thinks you’re smart.”

Loring ignored her. Calvin was holding the telescope in both hands, examining it. Brass and snakeskin leather—a beauty.

“Give it a try,” Loring said.

Calvin raised the telescope to his eye, aiming it across the street. “What the fuck?” he said. “Thing’s busted.”

He was holding the wrong end up. “Other side,” Loring said. He came down off the porch and moved toward him, felt the old teacher in him returning. “Just turn it—”

“He’s got it backward!” Eddie exploded. “He’s looking down the wrong side!”

Trisha chimed in laughing and Calvin instantly dropped the telescope on the lawn, caught feeling stupid or caught caring about something—maybe both. Loring’s heart sank. “Forget them,” he tried again. “Point it at the sky.” But he’d already lost him. Calvin looked down, picked something off his baggy sleeve. “Nah,” he said. “What else you got?”

Loring rubbed a palm over his bald head. All three were watching him, waiting. It was a cold day, but Eddie still wore shorts, his fleshy calves blotched with pink. Trisha’s eyes were so thick with makeup they looked sunken, her temples traced with pale blue veins.

“Well, that’s it for today,” Loring said.

They glanced at one another. Eddie scratched hard at his cheek. A bus stopped on the corner, brakes squealing, exhaling a sour plume of exhaust. “We got to come back tomorrow?” Calvin said.

“That’s how it works,” said Loring.

“How come?” Trisha demanded.

Loring shrugged. He didn’t have an answer, not one that he could admit. “That’s the way it is,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

“Leave it,” Trisha said, folding her skinny arms across her chest. “We don’t want your stupid hippie shit anyway.”

“That’s fine,” Loring bluffed.

The bus pulled away. Calvin was studying him carefully, hands in his deep pockets. “Why are you giving all this stuff away anyway, Loring?”

If there was a note of derision in his name, Loring couldn’t hear it. He looked the boy in the eye and said: “My wife died.”

“How?”

“Sick,” Loring said. “Sick for a very long time.”

Calvin held his gaze. Behind him, the other two were still now, listening.

“How long?”

“Ten years.”

“With what?”

“Cancer,” he said. “Breast cancer.”

At this, Eddie laughed, which Loring should have seen coming. He was angry at himself, angry at the boy—the disrespect, the superficial toughness. He thought of Gloria parting with her breasts, electing to lose both, thinking it might save her. Loring had seen true toughness. What he had seen—these kids could not imagine.

He cracked open a new beer, dropping the empty on the grass. “Hey,” Trisha pointed. “That’s littering. Hippies ain’t supposed to litter.”

For a moment, Loring felt a bolt of pure dislike for her, but knew better than to let it show. He took a sip and said evenly, “I can do what I want, Trish. It’s my house.”

Eddie scratched his elbow. “Let’s go. I’m hungry.”

But Calvin was still looking at Loring, his face solemn and lean. “Why are you giving this shit away, though?” he asked again, and he was right; Loring hadn’t answered the question. He considered it, staring down at the worn toes of his leather moccasins. He had always believed in taking young people’s questions seriously.

“Because,” he said, lifting his head. He squinted into the middle distance, squaring his shoulders. “None of it matters to me anymore, Calvin.”

“Shit,” said Eddie, and he started laughing again, but this was a laugh born of discomfort—Loring knew there were a million different reasons kids laughed.

“This is depressing,” Trisha said. “Loring, you’re the most depressing person I ever met in my life.”

But Calvin was looking at him seriously. Something had gotten through to the boy; maybe there was something in this sentiment he recognized, something about hopelessness he already understood. Loring smiled down at him, trying to take the edge off. “Besides,” he said, “there’s just too damn much in my house.”

Right away, he realized his mistake. Calvin’s bearing seemed to change, an almost imperceptible shifting. “You got a house full of good stuff, huh?” he said.

It occurred to Loring then that they might rob him. They might have been playing him this whole time. They had seemed like decent kids, but maybe he’d been naïve to trust them. He thought of Eddie scratching, the loose laughter. If they were into drugs—they were capable of anything. But still, he trusted them; he wanted to trust them. He wasn’t willing to give that up yet.

“I’ve lived here for a long time,” Loring shrugged. “I’m old, remember?”

“So you’re getting rid of all of it?” said Calvin.

“Not all,” Loring said, rubbing at his beard. “Some.” He was trying to find the place between guarded and friendly, but couldn’t quite get his bearings. He wished he hadn’t had so many beers, wished he were dressed differently—a tie, a pair of decent shoes.

“I know,” said Calvin. The other two were hanging back now, and Loring realized he had been wrong about this group: Calvin wasn’t on the sidelines. He was the leader. “Why don’t you let us go pick out what we want? You know, then we don’t got to keep coming back.”

Loring lifted his beer and sipped it, squinting at the ground, trying to think of a good excuse. He couldn’t admit how much he looked forward to their visits, how they filled his gaping, empty days—they would eat him alive. And he could think of no other reason to drag out this game. Still, to let them into his house—anybody knew this was unwise, but did he care? What was he protecting anymore? Maybe it was the beers, or the need to prove his brother wrong, or a career built on teaching kids like these. Whatever the reason, Loring let them inside.

*

In the basement, sunlight filtered through the two small dirty crescent windows above the oil burner. The dust hung thick in the dull shafts of light. In some places, paths were started where Loring had dug through the junk looking for the mirror, the telescope, but in many places the boxes piled all the way to the ceiling.

“Holy shit,” said Eddie. He sounded almost reverent.

“It smells,” Trisha said, and it did. The smell was like mildew and damp earth.

Looking around, they all seemed at a loss for how to begin. “Well, have at it,” Loring told them. They fanned out slowly. Trisha started by lifting up a stack of old quilts—Gloria’s mother’s quilts. She let them slump to the floor.

“Hey,” Loring said. “Careful with those.”

Calvin was inspecting a pair of carved wooden bookends, like a buyer in a store. Eddie ripped off the top of a large cardboard box. “Yo, hippie, what’s this?”

He was holding a brass sundial that Gloria once had in the garden. “A sundial,” Loring said. “It’s a clock that tells time by the sun—,” but Eddie had already let it fall with a loud clang. Loring began to feel uneasy. It was the carelessness.

“Look what I got!” Trisha announced.

She was wearing a floppy wide-brimmed hat, straw with a red flower, and all at once the day rushed back at Loring—long ago, after Gloria got that first clean diagnosis. They celebrated by driving to Barnegat Light; she’d bought the hat, and as they walked along the beach, the hat kept blowing in the water, Loring kept chasing it. He was filled with sudden clarity: this had been a mistake.

“Yo, look!” Eddie laughed. He was holding the long body pillow that Gloria sometimes slept with, rubbing it on his crotch. “It’s a sex doll!”

“Stop that,” Loring said. “Be respectful.” But it was a line that hadn’t worked on students either; discipline had never been his strong suit. The kids ignored him, tearing into more boxes and tossing things to the floor. “Oh, shit! Look!” they yelled, laughing. Eddie had opened up an old steamer trunk filled with Loring’s teaching memorabilia—student projects and papers, the globe from his first classroom. He upended the trunk and poured it on the ground. Loring saw the milk-jug stadium hit the wall, made by Maurice Morris, little gum-backed paper chairs skittering all over the floor.

“Eddie,” Loring said, trying to sound firm, but Eddie was throwing things in the empty trunk. Now that they had momentum, they were moving quickly, greedily. Trisha let out a shriek—she had found Gloria’s jewelry box, a delicate stained-glass case that Gloria had stashed on a high shelf for safekeeping. The jewelry wasn’t expensive, most of it, but it was Gloria’s.

“You can’t have that,” Loring told her, taking a step forward.

Calvin looked up. “You said you were getting rid of it,” he said.

“I said most of it—not all of it. That’s sentimental,” Loring said, then wondered if they’d know the meaning of the word. “It’s meaningful to me,” he said. “It’s very important to me.”

But Trisha had already begun piling bracelets on her arms and slinging beads around her neck. Loring saw a strand of blue freshwater pearls disappear over her head—Gloria had worn them at their wedding. “Please,” Loring said, the beginnings of desperation. “Please. Leave that alone.”

“Here, use this,” Calvin told her, unbuckling a suitcase, and the memory was like a shot to his spine—the powder-blue Samsonite Gloria had in college, the one she had been carrying the first time she came to visit and Loring picked her up at Thirtieth Street Station—Trisha poured in the rest of the jewelry, tossed the box on top. “That’s enough,” Loring said. There was a note of pleading in his voice. “You have enough now. I’d like you to leave.”

Calvin paused then and gave him a measured look, assessing something—the possible ways to deal with the increasing obstacle that was the sad old man in the corner, the relative ease and difficulty of things. It was the first time it occurred to Loring that the kids might be dangerous. Not only might they take everything he owned, everything he thought he didn’t want, they might hurt him. It also occurred to him that, a few weeks ago, he wouldn’t have cared. He hadn’t been suicidal, but he had been reckless in his passivity. Several nights he’d deliberately left his house unlocked. He hadn’t cared about anything. Now he did.

“I want that,” Loring said to the boy. “The suitcase.” His voice broke. “It was my wife’s.”

Calvin studied him for a moment, then said, “But we need it,” and returned to the task at hand.

Loring thought of going upstairs—but for what? He could call the cops but the kids would be gone by the time they got there. If he made for the stairs, they might try to stop him; he wasn’t sure what they were capable of. And it wasn’t like they were robbing him, exactly. He had invited them inside. He had given them things—his mirror, his turntable—at the memory of that Pioneer cord trailing them down the sidewalk, he felt a sickening plunge of loss. White spots snowed before his eyes. But when he moved to sit on the bottom step, Calvin glanced over sharply—Loring knew then he wouldn’t get upstairs if he tried. He sank onto the stairs and watched them fill up Gloria’s suitcase. “You miserable little fucks,” he whispered, his eyes swimming with tears.

Eddie hoisted up one end of the steamer trunk. He was panting, his red face sweating. “Grab that side, Trish,” he said, and she lifted the other. They came toward the stairs, trunk bumping between their knees, and Loring had to stand to let them pass.

“Shit, he’s crying!” Eddie said.

Trisha brought up the rear, wrists jangling. Gloria’s engagement ring flashed on her hand. Loring remembered, last spring, Gloria telling him she’d put her rings away for safekeeping. She’d lost so much weight they had started falling off her fingers. She was afraid she might lose them.

“Don’t cry, hippie,” Trisha said, as tears crawled down Loring’s cheeks.

Calvin buckled the blue Samsonite and started for the stairs. At the bottom, the boy paused and placed one hand on the railing. He looked at Loring with something like pity. “See you around, Loring,” he said, then hoisted the suitcase in both arms and bounded up the stairs.

Loring listened to the quick, jubilant thunder of footsteps across his living-room floor, the slam of the front screen door, then the silence. He sat on the bottom step and held his head in his hands. He willed the rest of the house to buckle and collapse around him, but it was oblivious to what had just happened, as oblivious as it had been on the morning Gloria stopped breathing. A morning in June, a morning like any other. Loring had sat for hours holding her hand, watching the sky turn from orange to pink to a diffuse, milky white. He hadn’t cried then or since, but he did now. Hard, racking sobs that seemed to rise up from his core. He pictured his chest cracking open, guts spilling out. He cried for everything he lost, everything he loved. He loved so much.

When finally Loring stood up, head throbbing, the windows glowed softly with dusk. His limbs were light and hollow, though every nerve rang with pain. He climbed the stairs slowly, feeling humbled and strange. Upstairs, the front door was flung wide open but the first floor appeared untouched. Loring pushed the door shut and locked it. He looked out the living-room window. The tarp was still draped across the tree, the sign flattened on the grass. The telescope was gone. He pulled the shade down and retreated to the darkness of his couch, but with the hedges cut back from the windows, he couldn’t keep the light from coming in the room.